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January Traffic, Earnings, Content – Crushed It!

by Darwin on February 1, 2011

January was the best month ever for Darwin’s Money (which is the goal every month!), with traffic more than doubling! I have to credit much of the surge to google’s search algorithm updates, where some existing articles started to pick up traction. I’ve also been routinely featured in various blog carnivals and roundups and freelancing brings in curious onlookers as well from larger sites like American Express and Wisebread. Have a look-see at this trend:

(click to enlarge)

While I don’t give out specific earnings numbers, I’ll provide a few tidbits.

Adsense revenues exceeded $1000 for the first time in a looong time, primarily due to some great search traffic. See, visitors from Google are much more likely to click through an Adsense ad than social network or return visitors since they’re not necessarily coming to your site looking for a search term. When someone googles a particular term and I have a relevant article, there’s a relevant ad block up there. Included in this value would be other projects like ETFBASE and other cats and dogs where I derive a few bucks a day.

Freelance work brought in a record amount as well.

I don’t make what I used to from affiliate conversions – something I should work on. I lay out what affiliate ads are in The Economics of Blogging 2.

I had a few direct ad placements for various things last month. The Yakezie network has been a big help in that arena, as I’ve been networking with great bloggers, as well as being included in various ad arrangements.

Oh, I just caught myself – that was your post LOL! I was thinking it was some mean-spirited hater. I actually thought your article was well-researched, articulated and thorough! And so did commentors. OK, so I’m not nuts. Feel free to post again any time!

Congrats on the great month! I picked up some serious traction last month as well, more than tripling my previous month’s traffic, and doubling adsense! Amazing what can happen when your search traffic picks up isn’t it? It’s also nice to get that nice big deposit from adsense at the end of the month, isn’t it? 🙂

Are those numbers and revenue just for Darwin’s Money? Those are awesome results and I’m sincerely happy for you. You’ll have to share with me sometime how you have time to update so many sites 😉 … I’ve been considering launching a second site but I’ve been incredibly lazy in updating my travel blog and I’m behind on the main site from all the moving and other stuff done lately, but I have also noticed that I’ve been getting a bit more efficient overall as time passes by.

I post some places once per week or so. Overall, it’s probably an average of a post per day. I write 2-3 articles some nights, then take Fridays, Saturdays off, etc. Not too bad – batch processing is the key!

I recently launched my blog with the realization that it will take time to see any sort of traffic let alone income. After reading many different blogs for several months I decided to take the leap. One of the main reasons I started the blog is to keep myself focused in getting our debts paid off so I can start investing in income producing real estate, which has been a lifelong dream and goal. I enjoy reading these posts about how to get traffic to your site and the basic economics of blogging. Thanks for this article and congrats on getting a large jump in traffic.

Congratulations on the crush! I have an informal goal at least a hundred posts before I start thinking about advertising. It’ll take some doing, since I haven’t even figured out about RSS and tweet link buttons yet 🙂

Great job!!! What an impressive increase in visits!!! And well, that starts to cascade into the other stats, so expect great numbers the following months.
I’m sure you’ll have great news for us in the following months.